Donald Sterling's offensive foul

Basketball’s summary ouster of Donald Sterling for his viral racist harangue is yet more proof — as if any were needed — that race remains the essential fault line in the American experience, even (or perhaps especially) in the age of Barack Obama.

But the National Basketball Association’s decision to ban the cranky L.A. Clippers owner from the game till death is also fresh evidence that the major commercial institutions of national life — whether the NBA or Fox News — find racist sentiment, overtly expressed, instantly and intolerably bad for business.

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Just as Sean Hannity and other media defenders of Cliven Bundy, the embattled Nevada rancher locked in quixotic standoff with the Bureau of Land Management, dropped him cold after he allowed that blacks might have been “better off as slaves,” so the NBA abandoned Sterling, whose benighted views on race have been the subject of public discussion and legal action for years, the moment that a recording of his own undisputed words surfaced on the gossip site TMZ.

Sterling’s tasteless tirade was beyond the pale, and not just because three-quarters of the NBA’s players and a sizable percentage of its fan base are black — or even because the Clippers’ guard Chris Paul heads the players union. Sterling had the audacity to despoil the league’s season playoffs and to threaten one of the pillars of the temple of professional sport that constitutes America’s secular religion — and a multibillion-dollar industry.

It was no accident that Sterling’s comments were the centerpiece of TMZ’s newly launched sports-oriented niche — part of its effort to cash in on a market that is richer and more lucrative than ever.

“It does seem like a moment,” said Yago Colas, who teaches a course on the “Cultures of Basketball” at the University of Michigan. “I hope it’s a moment that’s not lost. The problem is that we get really excited about spectacular demonstrations of racism, and in the process of our excitement, we overlook the larger institutional issues that endure.”

Fifty years ago this week, the United States Senate was tied in knots, facing a record-setting filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the landmark law aimed at making black and white Americans equal in the eyes of the law, 100 years after the Civil War. The floor debates preserved in the Congressional Record with unblinking candor would not surprise the most jaded current chroniclers of Sterling’s invective. (His comments were recorded by “V. Stiviano,” the onetime Sterling girlfriend who recorded the team owner’s private comments, in possible violation of a California state law requiring consent of taped parties.)

In one particularly notable exchange in April 1964, Sens. Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.) and Russell Long (D-La.) mused aloud about whether it was inhumane to use cattle prods on civil rights demonstrators.

“The prod sticks are not designed for cattle but are designed for exactly the kind of ‘animals’ they are touching,” Long allowed, “namely, reluctant human beings who insist on getting in the way of a policeman.”

For his part, Thurmond replied, “I remember going through a secret organization ceremonial — a fraternal organization. There was a man after me with one of those sticks and I ran for about 100 yards. I had to run fast to keep ahead of that stick because while it mostly tickled, it tickled pretty much.”

No sanctions, no fines, no lifetime bans — not even from their dismayed colleagues — chastened Thurmond or Long, who continued to win reelection and hold positions of great power for years to come.

So by the standard of 50 years ago, today’s universal condemnation of Sterling’s comments constitutes progress. The current controversy even managed to prompt a rare convergence between Obama and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who agreed with the president that the remarks were “ignorant and offensive.”